"William Powers Takes the Floor" (story 7, class workshop)

William Powers only limply believed in himself. Though his parents had rightly encouraged his pursuits throughout his life, and Will was grateful, they put too much on him at too young an age: marksmanship competitions, boys gymnastic teams, swimming and high dive. He was potent and noteworthy where he applied himself, wining a few tournaments and setting a record for distance shooting and accuracy. He was mediocre on the high dive, but excelled at lapped swimming. Briefly, Will once held a record for the backstroke at the high school level. Though he excelled, he only mildly enjoyed those ventures, finding accomplishment mostly though momentum. The long nights of writing, studying, swimming, shooting, balancing, and the sharp looks from father, cross bar glasses and comb over, when he occasionally dropped the ball, all sapped the passion from everything and brought the pressure on to accomplish more. And romance found Powers through the same opportunistic momentum, the leggy and blatant women finding him by virtue of his notable, though emotionally indifferent achievements. This is how and why Will Powers developed a mastery over holding his breath at a young age— finding, retaining, and mobilizing that fantastic, fleeting feeling when the blood rushes out from his head and everything on the edge of unconsciousness gets staticy and exciting.
It must have been about the time of his 22nd birthday, in the midst of his second year of college, when the pressure mounted to the critical threshold. It was just one day, the “one of these days” he’d mentioned, awakening in his cramped, sticky twin bed, the pine frame collapsing, the roommate passed out with the other drunken strangers, the empty refrigerator and mountains of convoluted reading and writing gnawing at him when the momentum finally gave out. He was doing fine, but his heart wasn’t in it. The ball stopped rolling.
William Powers sat up in his pathetic bed, took a deep breath, and held it in tightly. The seconds passed, and then a minute, and another and another. Seeking numbness from the academic and emotional world, Will vowed at that moment that he should hold his breath forever.
At first, it really wasn’t that bad. All the deep bronze drained from his strong, Aryan face, but that wasn’t so bad. In the first hour, his room mate awoke and noted Will’s determined, straining expression. He’d asked him all the sophomoric questions about weather or not he was constipated and everything— Will expected that. “Oh, wait wait, you’re holding your breath. You’re holding your breath, huh Will?”
Will realized he could no longer reply, his mouth squeezed tightly.
“Huh, Will? What’s the problem, huh?”
He lunged to tickle his stomach, but Will was determined. He slapped the hand away, coming close to laughing for only a moment before standing and forcefully flattening both his hands out in opposing directions as to say ‘no.’ Will was determined; it was the escape, he knew, that could keep him feeling ample. His life desperately needed some satisfaction and pleasurable instance, and this was something he could maintain.

But in the passing weeks, though the necessity of all his thoughts scribbling over countless pads of paper distributed by nasty realtors was a pain, the tightening feeling in his stomach and neck and his heart was a definite distraction. His skin was becoming terribly splotchy, and his entire face, day by day, noticeably contorted outward as his body ballooned in quite the literal sense, the flat blue eyes starting to look in different directions with the extended curvature of his face. Will visited the doctor, just for a heads up.
It was the man he’d trusted with his health for most of his life; Dr. John Robert, of course, had been there for over 15 years. He was there the day Will went jousting on his BMX and planted his face into the black top. He was there when Will mistakenly dove headlong into the shallow end. Dr. Robert was a no-bullshit guy’s guy, still broad shouldered from college ‘ball, sporting the beard and goatee and the parted hair that, in part, made him a sexual legend back in USC ’76. He was the guy you trusted to joke with you about your girlfriend, his wife, the exploits of women in general, with one hand cupped around your balls.
He reviewed the clipboard, then set it down along with his stethoscope. “Will— Christ, how long has it been? 17, 18 years? I’ve known you since you were a man in training, right?” He chuckled athletically, socking his shoulder slightly, and Will smirked with restraint, the pressure stretching every atom in his body. “But Will… I’ve got to tell you bud, man to man and as your doctor, whatever you’re doing isn’t gonna work for you. Your blood oxygen is down, you’ve got, you’ve got…” he sighed, rubbing his temple, and found the point “Will, this lifestyle can’t work, and it’s gonna— it’s gonna kill you, Will. You can’t keep this up.”
But William, set firmly in place, the ball back in motion and with weight, shook his head and stood defiantly from the leather examining table. ‘NO,’ he scribbled with nearly illegible anger, ‘this is MY decision. This is my LIFESTYLE and my CULTURE and you—‘ he finished the page and flipped to the next, ‘CANT TELL ME WHAT TO DO.’ He stormed from the office, never to hear from Doc Robert again.

The months passed. Will got on with the studies marginally well, though physically, he was a terrible mess. The ballooning continued, increasing very slightly every hour, the grotesque purple splotches on his skin making outrageous, namable shapes: North America across his forehead, Liz Taylor on one cheek and a burger on the other. Though he was not really any heavier, the ballooning being the result of some science of the oxygen and nitrogen and all that in his lungs changing, his clothes stretched radically all the same. Most could no longer see Will Powers for himself, only Will Powers for the crazy, stubborn, over-inflating thing he was rapidly becoming. His girlfriend finally left; “our lifestyles are just too different.” The social stigma was all consuming.

The spiral steepened as Will grew in size and hue, his eyelids tightening to contain the ever-growing pressure. Time blurred despairingly. How long had it been? How many months? Though he expanded at quite a dependable rate, each new centimeter contained the hell of a new, never ending Indian-burn across his entire body, the pain of the next centimeter additive to the last. Socially, Will had fallen away completely from the life of his school. Luck turned on him viciously. The employers at the campus coffee shop fired him, citing the abusive lifestyle. His grades were falling; most of his hours were spent in his dank, shadowed dorm room, focusing on remaining conscious and exploring Myspace.
Finally, the day dawned when Will discovered he was not alone. Through Myspace groups, he found others quite like himself: Humanity Under Breath Regulation Insistence, H.U.B.R.I., a group for those suffering the terrible side effects of their chosen lifestyle. Hyper-inflated but not willing to back down. He found Dee Wilflat, a breath holder from Michigan who’d been at it for a year longer than Will. In the Myspace picture, the skin and muscles in her face seemed transparent like a bubblegum bubble, and extended even a foot beyond his own. Will thought she must have been a fantasy in the past, before she held her breath, but she still had nice hair from what he could tell. The group’s leader, Wren Pollowi, was a like-minded Floridian guy. Through their correspondence, Will discovered many in the group of over 450 were victims, terrible victims of their side effects and the injustice of callus employers, all fired only for their lifestyles. ‘These fools MUST BE STOPPED,’ Will wrote to himself.

The group met in person over enormous luncheons, some flying in over thousands of miles. Will, like most of them there, had grown accustomed to wearing draped fabrics in a toga fashion versus tailored clothes, which chafed dangerously on their bubbling, transparent skin.
It was the second of these luncheons when Will Powers finally shook hands with Wren Pollowi, the great organizer of the group and the luncheons. He remembered quite vividly the moment of their meeting: Will sat in awe at the tiny metal framed patio table as the white van pulled up by the curb and the door slid open. Draped in flowing purple robes, Wren slowly emerged from the shadow of the van, so expanded by the pressure of the air that his flesh was almost completely transparent, his vein covered skull and rib cage utterly naked to them all. Will admired that Wren was that dedicated to his lifestyle.
‘You see, for us William, there is no longer an option of returning to the old ways,’ Wren wrote on his mini white board, ‘due to the possibility of deflation.’
‘What do you mean?’ wrote Will.
‘Deflation. Because the breath has been held for so long, and the tension sustained—‘ he erased and began again, ‘for so long, releasing the air now will literally deflate your entire body, as in the balloon. Your body can’t handle the release, William.’
Will quietly pondered the implications of this new fact.

It was true. There was no going back and instead, he knew they must gain recognition world wide for the terrible future that lie ahead of them and the medical certainty they must face.

Together, with his new allies and new devotion, Will set about the political and judicial wrangling to make their cause known: everywhere, the ones brave enough to defy social norms, to hold their breaths despite all odds.

In a whirlwind of only a handful of months, he found himself on the dusty senate floor, his body numb and inflated but his palms sweaty. He’d made his case all across his realtor pads and a white board before the hearing, deeply divided on the issue of weather or not the Americans with Disabilities Act should be reworded slightly to include “people with adversity due to withheld breath,” or PADWeBs, as the press cited.
A heavy set man, perpetually angry and balding, grumbled and cleared his throat for recognition. “Let my position be known on this committee, to this committee, to the American people and to the world,” he began, “that these people seek to utilize the ADA in ways which, by their doing so, would unjustly, unrightly, unacceptably undermine those who—“
“Now wait a minute—“ a voice from a suit on the committee cut in.
“—ADA was originally intended, be—“
“I’ve got a question for you, I’ve got a question—“
“—and we cannot— oh, you’ve got a question for me, the independent senator from—“
“How can you say ‘those people’? How can you say that, senator, you and your party—“
“Of course ‘those people,’ those people over there—“
“Issues of racism! Racism!” a blue suit cried.
“—the mess they’ve caused, if only they’d stop holding their breaths!”
The floor erupted in senselessness and weasel words and resounding truthiness, fingers pointing, the dust shifting. Will again felt the terrible strain of outward pressure of the breath that he could never exhale. Why were they fighting? To what end could this terrible bickering arrive? Why was all of this happening to begin with?
A tiny microbe of dust made it’s way through Will’s outstretched nostril, settling on the tiny hair follicles. The tickle surged through his body.

Without warning, William Powers made a shrieking, half second squeal like a shout and a wail together. He erupted in a sickening “pop” before the senate and the press, his lawyer blown yards away, table splintering, his sticky flesh and giblets splaying out to coat the members of the floor like exploded bubblegum.



I've realized after this that I'm a terrible sadist with all my characters and almost universally punish them...